Can the universe exist without observers?

It's been argued that wave function collapse requires the involvement of an "intelligent observer", but wouldn't that imply that either nothing existed before humans came into being or that there has been some form of intelligent life since the Big Bang?

Follow

36 answers 36

Report Abuse

Are you sure that you want to delete this answer?

Sorry, something has gone wrong.

Trending Now

Answers - Page 2 of 4

"observer" is a misleading expression. The wave function collapses when a particle interacts with ANY matter . Its just called an observer because someone usually observes and therefore performs the interaction in experiments . Most interactions in the real world are with inanimate things not intelligent observers.

Please! There were no people to observe the universe or anything else. There was only God and God is not going to deny himself! What came first the chicken or the egg? The chicken, because without the chicken there would be no egg. So God came first then his offspring! So where are the observers? You should be more worried about narcissism because it is rampant!

State reduction - a more general description than wavefunction collapse - is an unknown process in physics. We do not know how the non-local behavior of quantum system is reduced to a local value upon interaction with the environment.

Quantum physics can only tell us the state of the system was before interacting with the environment (e.g. wavefunction is defined exactly as a function of position and time), and it can tell us what value(s) are measured (or can be measured) after the interaction.

We do know that any system of any significant size will undergo decoherence very, very quickly as it undergoes multiple interactions with the environment. That decoherence has nothing to do with intelligent observation. It is like the difference between throwing a couple of rocks in a pond and seeing very clearly the coherent interference patterns of waves vs throwing millions in at the same time and seeing no coherent interference patterns.

There is absolutely nothing in the mathematics of quantum mechanics that requires an intelligent observer.